Style Trial | Valentino wool and silk dress

Don’t worry, Style Sleuths: you haven’t gotten lost on the highways and bye-ways of the Internet and ended up on the wrong website altogether. This isn’t, you see, an image from some strange made-for-TV costume drama involving a sexy, high-fashion nun who goes astray (Although, as an aside, we would totally watch that…): it’s a product shot for a £2535 Valentino dress. As in, they’re expecting you to wear this. In public, presumably.

So, we have to ask: where would you wear this? And don’t say, “On Halloween, dressed as a bishop, or other religious figure,” because that doesn’t count. Seriously, though, we’re wracking our brains here, and while this isn’t actually offensive, in the way some so-called “fashion” items can be (We’re thinking of all of those dresses and skirts that are completely see-through, here. And no, we’re not offended because they’re see-through: we’re mostly offended that designers think we’re going to pay $2,000 for a completely invisible item of clothing, when we could just go outside nekkid and get the same look for free.), we still can’t think of a single occasion for which this would be just the thing to wear.

On the plus side, though, we can’t wait for the moment in the movie when the nun whips out a pair of scissors and transforms the dress into a mini:

Still: just because we wouldn’t have a use for a particular item of clothing, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it must be a crime of fashion. That’s why we’re handing this one over to you: IS this crime of fashion? Or is it the kind of thing you’d wear so often it would be worth every single penny of that £2535?